In May, Richard K. Lyons, Bank of America Dean and Professor of Business at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, announced a bold new curriculum for the school that focuses on developing innovative leadership. Describing the current era as one of “unsustainabilities”—in such varied realms as public education, healthcare, aging, and the environment—Lyons argues that business schools need to “create and help develop path-bending leaders” who can find innovative solutions to difficult challenges.

This month, Dean Lyons will deliver the closing keynote address at GMAC’s 2010 Annual Industry Conference. To get a peek inside the new Haas curriculum and a hint of what other issues are top-of-mind with Dean Lyons, Deans Digest recently caught up with him.

Q: Where do you think graduate management education is headed in the short term and farther out? What general trends do you see?

A: First, managers and leaders increasingly need to influence without authority or beyond authority. The notion of command and control is increasingly less relevant. So bigger ways of thinking about influence [are in order]. Second, thinking about conflict management, conflicts of interest, and multiple constituencies—it’s really not just shareholders anymore (and maybe never has been). The richness of the multiple constituency environment in so many business leadership contexts is increasing.

If we look at business schools more introspectively, one element that we’re grappling with more and more is our own culture. The great organizations are invariably described by strong norms and values. As we start to think about how we are creating norms among students who come to our business schools, it seems to me that we have been a lot less deliberate than we need to be about the norms and values that we are reinforcing, whether it’s about career choice, or thinking about one’s role in society and the way one manages and leads. I think firms are much more deliberate about this than business schools are. Firms get paid for being usefully different. Another macro theme, therefore, is how do business schools develop leaders that are producing useful differentness? How do we build organizational capacity for differentness? I think that is absolutely fundamental, and I think we have some hard thinking to do in that area.

Q: In your view, what are the one or two greatest challenges facing graduate management education today?

A: One has to look at the broader social context and understand that society is not that happy with us as business schools. So a major challenge is to respond intelligently to the fact that we are part of a system that performed very poorly over the last three years. Are we to blame? Obviously not exclusively, but we are part of that system. So that’s a major near-term challenge—what will society want to see, and how will we deliver it? For example, do we need to be more deliberate about reinforcing norms and values? Should we have a code of conduct?

Another challenge is when we admit people into business schools, increasingly it’s the case that you can’t have stumbled. [The usual mindset is that] if you got a C in a class, didn’t do so well on the GMAT, or had some interruption in your career path, you won’t land where you want to land. Industry wide, therefore, we are de facto selecting people who haven’t run the big experiments in their lives that they might have. This could be one of those unintended consequences that is having more impact than we realize.